As Jaws released on Blu-ray, remembering when movies had teeth

Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper and Robert Shaw as Quint on the Orca in Jaws 30th Anniversary Edition.

It’s not all that glamorous, but it’s true: The modern movie business was born in a flooded L.A. men’s room in the thick summer smog of 1975.

Four studio executives from Universal were desperately trying to find a quiet place in the din of a packed lobby. They had work to do, and they needed to do it quickly, says screenwriter, actor and author Carl Gottlieb.

“After the second preview, before the picture was released, we had a hysterical reaction from the audience,” says the man who cut his teeth scripting the Bob Newhart Show, All in the Family, and The Odd Couple.

“It was like, oh, we have something here...” says Gottlieb over the phone from L.A.

“So I remember this little conference in the men’s room, because it was the only quiet place, and we stood there in a quarter inch of water — because people had held their bladders — and they came up with this historical release pattern that now governs how movies have been released ever since.”

Gottlieb says until that particular toilet moment, he wasn’t sure if Jaws would leave tooth marks on the pop culture psyche because he was just too close to the whole process.

“It’s like Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. He’s lying on his back and hard at work painting. It’s only when he’s finished that you can stand back and think, wow, what a ceiling!” says Gottlieb.

“For the whole time he was creating, he was really just problem-solving and managing the different creative issues.”

For the Italian master, the central challenges were plaster, paint consistency and the pressures of the Papacy. For Gottlieb and his buddy, director Steven Spielberg, the great big problem was the malfunctioning great white shark and a script that was largely scrapped at the last minute.

Originally hired as an actor, Gottlieb headed to Martha’s Vineyard to play the editor of the local newspaper. Yet, when the big-budget movie started to run into severe technical problems, his friend asked him to take a stab at rewriting the adaptation of Peter Benchley’s bestseller about a man-eating shark terrorizing the residents of a seaside town.

“I remember it as the happiest collaboration of my career,” says the man who also penned David Crosby’s biography, as well as an intimate account of the whole Jaws process.

“It was intense . . . and a great time for a writer.”

Gottlieb can’t help be a little nostalgic about the movie that changed the way Hollywood functioned and gave the world the saturated release pattern, where one movie is released in thousands of theatres on the same day. Before Jaws, movies were released market by market. No one had ever put a single movie on 400 screens at once.

“It was a huge risk for the studio. But it paid off.”

Indeed, it was a huge risk for everyone because the age of the multiplex had yet to dawn. Theatre owners had only one screen and lots of seats, so if the movie didn’t pull an audience, it was bad for everyone.

Of course, Jaws proved the most successful movie of its day and changed the course of motion picture history, eventually racking up more than $260 million US in receipts and prompting a series of sequels, not to mention several home entertainment editions — including a new re-issue to celebrate Universal’s 100th anniversary, set for release August 14.

“Jaws was an anomalous way of making a movie,” Gottlieb says with a quiet laugh. “Most films, especially big-budget films, don’t begin shooting without a script that’s been vetted . . . but Jaws had been through two iterations of the screenplay when Steven asked me to criticize it as a friend.”

Though from different generations, with Gottlieb, now 74, being the elder of the two, they shared an agent as well as a soft spot for the 1951 Christian Nyby science-fiction classic, The Thing.

“At first, I was just polishing dialogue, but it soon turned into more.”

Gottlieb changed character arcs, reduced his own role, and found himself writing around Bruce — the mechanical beast, and star of the film who proved very temperamental.

“We had to be inventive, and we held the creature back until the second half of the movie . . . like they did in The Thing. But we still had to keep the villain alive, and show the horror.”

Gottlieb says the restrictions made for a better narrative experience in the end. Audience members were forced to use their own imagination, which in turn brought out a certain level of personal engagement with the epic material.

Yes. Epic.

“Jaws is really Moby Dick meets [Ibsen’s] Enemy of the People,” says Gottlieb. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

Certainly, there are many ways of looking at Jaws: Spielbergian spectacle, modern marketing sensation, Hollywood’s grand seduction. But the bottom line is, the film was well-written, and if Gottlieb has any lingering resentment about the current model that he helped create, it’s the current lack of attention to good screenwriting.

“I thought Iron Man was good, and so was Avatar and Alien . . . but sadly, because of the concerns of corporate ownership, the last decade of scripts have been pretty stupid. Everyone is going for the home run and hoping it will pay off big,” he says.

“There is a lot of pandering now. It’s somewhat atavistic. Before, it was a more thoughtful game and there was more room for balance.”

Gottlieb wears his frustration with grace. “I come from a generation that really had the best of all worlds. There was enough to go around. There were enough venues, enough work for everyone, housing was cheap, and you could make a living as an artist.”

Greed, says Gottlieb, has been the unravelling of all that good — and Hollywood, which used to represent the dream factory, is now the last place to seek salvation. Then again, they’re just mirrors of a larger social problem which Gottlieb dubs “the sh--heads in charge.”

“I just wish (they) would think a little bit more globally in terms of continuity,” he says. “They don’t seem to realize that if they want this to be here for their children, they’re going to have to make a mid-course correction.”

He pauses, and laughs the haunting chortle of a man who knows better than to hope for the impossible. “What can I say? . . . If global warming doesn’t kill us, the studios will.”

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